Social Media Marketing
From a business point of view, Social Media opens-up a useful avenue for brands to reach their audiences and inexpensively interact with them. Social Media Marketing has thus gained importance and forms an integral part of the company’s marketing mix to generate revenue.
Definition of Social Media Marketing
SMM is defined as the use of social media platforms by businesses to communicate with audiences and to build a strong brand identity for themselves. This involves regularly posting engaging content that creates awareness, increases website traffic, and generates leads.
Composing a Social Media Marketing strategy
It is essential for brands to have a presence on social media. However, this is not enough. They should also ‘stand out’ from the rest of their competitors. Social media marketing has no thumb-rule that guarantees success due to its dynamism and changing preferences of the viewers.
InVideo has enlisted a few components that need to be kept in mind while designing an excellent social media marketing strategy for your organization.
These include:
Define the objective
You should define the objective of your strategy. To do this, answer the question: what is social media marketing going to do for you? The social media manager cannot define this objective by himself. A meeting should be arranged to include all stakeholders to build a concrete strategy that would benefit the organization and sync with the company’s goals.
Some of the objectives that a company would enlist are:
Increase in Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is the primary reason why marketers choose social media. Followers on social media love to share new posts from their favourite brand’s social network handles. This increases the chances of the brand to reach an even broader audience base.
Interacting with Customers: Unlike other traditional marketing platforms that provide one-way communication, social media is a two-way platform. It allows your customers to freely voice their opinions and share their experience of doing business with you. The brand can reach out to customers by sharing information, updates, and, announcing special offers through their social media accounts, for the benefit of their customers.
Generating New Leads: Marketers can choose to run organic or paid campaigns to attract prospective buyers. One can even opt to create Facebook ad for Shopify. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram also have a dedicated ‘lead generation’ advertisement option to collect details of interested audiences.
Effective Customer Service: Social media is the best way to keep your customers happy and increase the chances of repeat purchase. Customers can voice their grievances by directly messaging or tagging the brand’s social media page. In turn, the organization’s customer care team can revert and resolve the query in time. Monitoring tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social and TweetDeck help in tracking real-time conversations about your brand across various social media platforms
Understand Your Target Audience:
Marketers must keep track of the social media preferences of their target audience. This helps in understanding what social networking sites do their audiences spend the most time on and what are the most active social hours during the day. For example, an active Pinterest user might be inclined to browsing content and checking out Pinterest ads during his most creative hour of the day. Hence, brands give importance to scheduling posts and taking them ‘live’ during the most engaging period. Some of the social media scheduling tools are Buffer, Hootsuite, Loomly, and AgoraPulse.
Create Engaging Content
Make sure you plan out a monthly social media calendar and cover topics that are to be communicated to the followers. The content should be appealing and unique, to grab the attention of the viewer. Video content is gaining popularity, and brands can leverage it to showcase products, testimonials, and tutorials. Even live streaming from an event is now possible on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Social Media Advertising
New-age advertising includes sponsored stories, posts, videos, or carousels on followers’ social media news feeds. This effective model allows marketers to filter the target audience based on parameters such as age, location, interests, and even job designation.
Advertisements are run to increase Instagram followers, get more engagement, or generate sales leads. Some brands even tie-up with social media influencers to subtly advertise their product.
Monitor Social Media Performance:
To stay relevant and outshine the competition, it is essential to continually monitor the performance of your social media handles, campaigns, and advertisements. Parameters such as the increase in subscriptions, engagement, follower count, and viewership give you a fair picture of a brand’s social media presence.
Some marketers even analyze the marketing patterns of their competitors and refine their strategies accordingly. An in-depth interpretation of the paid campaigns enables your team to calculate ROI rather easily. Some of the standard social media monitoring tools are; Google Analytics, RankingGrow, BuzzSumo, Keyhole, and Tailwind.
Conclusion:
We have attempted to provide an essential structure for you to start planning your social media strategies effectively. However, you need not ponder too much on perfecting the strategy. Just get started, be authentic, and make your audience feel like they deserve to be on your social media pages more than ever before. Be flexible with your plans as customers’ preferences change and so do social media trends.
